THE Catholic Church paedophile scandal is moving like a contagion from one country to another, but the implications of the German complaints are potentially more damaging to the Vatican than any others.Apart from the horror of the abuse for the victims, Germany is one of the biggest funders of the Vatican.
This is an important factor for an institution regularly on the verge of bankruptcy.
It is also the home country of Pope Benedict XVI and is more likely to drag him into the middle of the scandal than any other country.
This is despite the fact that the former Cardinal Ratzinger was the first high-ranking prince of the Church to get to grips with the problem and institute a zero-tolerance attitude.
The German bishops responded more quickly than the Irish bishops to the revelations that began late last year, centred mainly around the many Catholic private schools in the country.
They sent a delegation to Ireland to meet the Irish bishops’ conference — and learn how not to handle the situation by learning from Irish mistakes, said an insider.
For more than a decade the Irish bishops kept the scandal under wraps and the Vatican only got involved after Judge Yvonne Murphy’s report exposed what lay behind the wall of silence.
Rome, however, was immediately alerted by the German Church authorities — partly because of the fallout from the Irish experience; partly because the Pope is German but also because he had set up a system where all complaints were to be notified to the Vatican.
The German Catholic Church is among the wealthiest in the world as the state collects Church tax from the faithful and distributes it to the various recognised churches. The amount is about 8% of a worker’s income tax and parents also pay on behalf of children.
With just over 30% of Germany’s population, about 27 million people, registered as Catholic the sums collected are sizeable, amounting to €5.6 billion in 2008.
They share the money with the Vatican and in 2007 their diocesan contribution of €6.5 million (at 30% of the total) was the largest from any country.
That year the administration of the Holy See made a loss of over €9m.
The money is now under threat from two sources. Firstly, a recent court ruling says that anyone who stops paying the Church tax cannot be automatically excommunicated — something that happened up to now.
Last year 300 Catholics were excommunicated every day when they de-listed from the tax payment. In the nine years to 2007, 1.1 million were excommunicated.
Some simply do not want to pay the tax, but the trend has gained momentum because of various controversies including the Pope’s readmission of Holocaust denier Bishop Richard Williamson.
The German media reported that in some areas the numbers leaving the Church doubled last year compared to 2008. The numbers leaving are expected to increase again with the paedophilia revelations, which numbered more than 300 allegations last week.
Apart from affecting the Vatican’s coffers, the decreasing number paying Church tax also has implications for the German state.
The Catholic Church is still powerful in Europe’s most populous country and it runs a large number of private schools where many of the elite send their children — and which are now the centre of the abuse controversy. It also runs many care homes and hospitals.
As Cardinal Ratzinger, the Pope headed one of a number of bureaux within the Vatican, handling complaints about abusing priests.
But as the sex scandals in the US gained momentum the Pope at the time decided the bishops would have to send all such cases to Rome and put Cardinal Ratzinger in charge.
As a result he is one of the few if not the only person to read the more than 3,000 files that landed on his desk in the next 18 months.
Over the next few years, despite opposition, he introduced a zero-tolerance policy and priests were expelled rapidly in a large number of cases.
However, even this enlightenment has not been enough to reassure the public in many countries, including Ireland, that the Church is in favour of meting out justice and understands the plight of the victims.
The German Church has said it will cooperate in every way with the state investigation and the Jesuits, whose schools are deeply implicated in the scandal, have reacted in an open and much more positive way than in Ireland.
The Pope has been implicated in the scandals. In Munich, where when he was archbishop, an abusing priest was simply reassigned after treatment. He has said he was not aware of the case.
Whether he can stay sufficiently ahead of the scandals to ensure the Vatican is not further implicated is an open question.
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